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Concept
Casta
Summary
Casta (ˈkasta) is a term which means "lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, the term also refers to a 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". From the outset, colonial Spanish America resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of Spaniards (españoles), Amerindians (indios), and Africans (negros). Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an Indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African. A plethora of terms were used for people with mixed Spanish, Amerindian, and African ancestry in 18th-century casta paintings, but they are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
Casta is an Iberian word (existing in Spanish, Portuguese and other Iberian languages since the Middle Ages), meaning "lineage". It is documented in Spanish since 1417 and is linked to the Proto-Indo-European "Ger". The Portuguese casta gave rise to the English word caste during the early modern period.
In the historical literature, how racial distinction, hierarchy, and social status functioned over time in colonial Spanish America has been an evolving and contested discussion. Although the term sistema de castas (system of castes) or sociedad de castas ("society of castes") are utilized in modern historical analyses to describe the social hierarchy based on race, with Spaniards at the apex, archival research shows that there is not a rigid "system" with fixed places for individuals. rather, a more fluid social structure where individuals could move from one category to another, or maintain or be given different labels depending on the context. In the 18th century, "casta paintings", imply a fixed racial hierarchy, but this genre may well have been an attempt to bring order into a system that was more fluid.
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